


Tech Support

by biblionerd07



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky breaks a phone, Frustrating "hold" music, Gen, Not understanding technology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-29
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-21 07:41:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1542974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biblionerd07/pseuds/biblionerd07
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All Bucky wanted to do was get the internet working so Steve would be proud of him.  It doesn't go as planned.  (Or: Bucky's first foray into tech support.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tech Support

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by my own frustrating call to tech support today. I wanted to scream.

No good deed goes unpunished. Bucky should have remembered that. But instead, he wanted to be helpful. Their internet had been on the fritz, and usually Steve took care of things like that, but Steve hadn’t had time yet, so one day, while Steve was out for a run, Bucky decided to call the number stuck onto the internet box (there was a name for it, but Bucky didn’t care) with a sticky note. A robot told him to _press 4 for technical support_ , so he dutifully did so. Upbeat piano music filled his ear. How was this helping? He hung up, startled, thinking he’d done something wrong, and dialed the number again. The same thing happened, so this time, Bucky waited. No one could say he couldn't adapt. After five minutes, the music started to get on his nerves, but then the line rang and someone answered.

“Tech support, this is Adam, how can I help you?” The voice was bored.

“Uh, hi, I’m having some trouble with the internet.” Bucky tried his politest voice.

“Residential or business?” Bored Adam asked.

“R-residential?” Bucky ventured. It was in their house; that would be residential, right?

“Please hold while I transfer you.” Adam didn’t wait for a response, and the music was back. This time Bucky had to wait for ten minutes, and he wasn’t exaggerating. He kept pulling the phone away from his ear to check the little timer. He doodled while he waited, bored. This music was really getting annoying.

“Tech support, this is Lindsey, how can I help you?” This time the voice was perky.

“Um, my internet—”

“Residential or business?” Lindsey cut him off.

“Residential.” Bucky felt his eyebrows draw in. Hadn't he already gone through this with Adam?

“Please hold while I transfer you.” Lindsey didn’t wait, just like Adam hadn’t, and Bucky couldn’t think fast enough to speak up. The music came back. Bucky clenched his teeth. Wow, this was irritating as hell.

Ten minutes went by. Bucky was practicing his deep breathing to control his anger like Bruce had taught him. Privately, Bucky had his doubts about Bruce’s authority on controlling anger, but he’d kept them to himself because he liked Bruce.

“Tech support, this is Andrew, how can I help you?” Andrew sounded suspiciously similar to Adam.

“My internet—”

“Residential or business?”

Bucky took a deep breath and tried to envision his anger leaving him. It didn’t work so well. “Residential.”

“Alright, did you try resetting the router?” Andrew asked. Bucky hadn’t personally tried anything, but he remembered Steve unplugging the box thing and plugging it back in.

“Yes.”

“Are you connecting wirelessly?”

“Um…” There were no wires going into the computer. Steve said the internet was called _Wi-Fi_ , though both were mystified about what that meant. “Wi-Fi?” Bucky guessed. Andrew didn’t stifle his sigh as well as he probably thought he did.

“Yeah, is it Wi-Fi?” Andrew didn’t have much room to be long-suffering, Bucky thought.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, go ahead and connect with a hard line.” Andrew instructed. Bucky looked around blankly.  
  
“How?” He asked. This time Andrew didn’t even try to hold in his frustration.

“With a cord.” He sounded like he was rolling his eyes and Bucky could feel himself getting annoyed, too.

“I don’t think we have one.” He protested.

“Well, we can’t run diagnostics from a wireless connection. Can you borrow one from a neighbor?”

Bucky didn’t even _know_ the neighbors. He’d only been living with Steve for a month, and it had been a week since he’d been able to step foot outside the house without Steve bobbing anxiously at his elbow, and people around here didn't seem too keen to talk to each other, much less Bucky with his metal arm. He clenched his teeth and counted to ten. He thought maybe he’d seen a cord that looked almost like something that connected to a phone in one of the drawers in the kitchen. He rummaged for a minute before he found it. It went into the wall where the internet box connected, and then he found a place to put it into the computer. He felt he deserved some kind of recognition for his good work, but he wasn’t going to try to get it from Andrew. Steve would be appropriately enthusiastic when Bucky was the big hero who'd tackled tech support and got the internet going.

“Uh, okay, it’s connected.” Bucky said. He felt a little less annoyed now that they were going to fix it.

“Disable your wireless connection.” Andrew ordered. Bucky’s annoyance came back in full force.

“How?” He ground out. Andrew sighed again and Bucky felt like he was going to lose his teeth from grinding them. Andrew walked him through how to do it and then asked if Bucky was able to access any websites, adding with an unhelpful level of snark that Bucky could try typing something like google.com into the bar at the top. Bucky fought the urge to mention that in _his_ day people in a _service industry_ were a lot more willing to _serve_. Sam had told them when Bucky and Steve said things like _in my day_ , they sounded as ninety-five as they actually were.

“Yeah, it’s working plugged in.” Bucky said, staring at the google doodle he didn’t understand.

“Well, that means it’s a problem with the router, not the internet. You can try calling the manufacturers.” Andrew hung up and Bucky realized what a mistake he’d made in holding the phone in his left hand. He’d clenched it too hard in his frustration and now it was broken.

Steve walked in the door just then, and Bucky wanted to throw the damn broken phone at his head. He looked far too chipper for Bucky’s feelings. He was _whistling_.

“You call the damn router manufacturers!” Bucky yelled, slamming the useless phone on the table. Steve’s confused and wounded expression would have been comical if Bucky wasn’t struggling to not become homicidal. He had that song from being on hold stuck in his head.

“Buck, what’s wrong?” Steve asked, his stupid face all stupid in its earnestness. Bucky tried deep breathing. It didn’t help.

“I called the goddamn tech support people and they said it wasn’t their problem!” Bucky snarled. He stormed out of the room because he was going to punch Steve soon. He held his breath and tried to calm down. Logically, he knew this was not Steve’s fault. But hell if that made Bucky less irritated.

He felt extremely vindicated when he heard Steve on the phone half an hour later, the eternal patience apparently having run out, shouting, “You already transferred me! I’ve been on hold for twenty-five minutes!” Five minutes later he even swore, and Bucky heard the phone thunk down on the table.

“We’re calling Stark and making him fix the damn thing!” Steve screamed, and suddenly Bucky felt completely better. He laughed, but he kept it quiet, because if Steve was as frustrated as Bucky had been, laughter was the last thing he wanted to hear.

There were good things about the 21st Century, but tech support was not one of them.


End file.
